The PS3 was incredible value dollar-to-flop, given that it was sold at a loss. This resulted in universities and other research institutes buying them en masse to create supercomputer clusters. Naturally buying thousands of consoles but not a single game puts sony in a difficult position. Although I think it's sad the hardware got locked down in later revisions, I fully understand why they did it.

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mschild 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The US Department of Defense went quite a bit further. They created the Condor Cluster in 2010 which was comprised of 1760 PS3s. At the time it was placed 33rd worldwide for a supercomputer.

https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomput...

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extraduder_ire 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

At the time, entire PS3s were cheaper than what it cost to get the CPU from IBM.

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genewitch 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

at some point it was claimed that the reason sony removed the ability to run linux was because, literally, Saddam Hussein (maybe not) was using them to pilot jets or somesuch.

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b00ty4breakfast 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I haven't looked, but I am pretty sure that Saddam was dead before the ps3 launched. At the very least, his 2003/2004 ouster was before the ca 2007ish (I think) launch date.

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genewitch an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I said the word claimed. in the past. And it was more like: thousands of PS2 because sony/japan marked them dual use because they "were so powerful." So probably astro-turfed or even native advertising (considering the place that "broke" the story.)

buuuuut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster the US government went ahead and did make a supercomputer out of PS3s.

anyhow thanks for helping me confirm my memory is functioning perfectly.

ETA: https://web.archive.org/web/20041120084657/http://arrakis.nc... probably where this "wacky" idea came from...

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b00ty4breakfast 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ok, I looked it up; Saddam Hussein was executed on December 30, 2006 and the ps3 launched on Nov 11, 2006 in Japan and Nov 17, 2006 in the US. So, technically, he was alive for the launch.

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Intermernet an hour ago | parent [-]

That factoid has the ingredients for an awesome conspiracy theory ;-)

	▲	genewitch 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		in case you don't check up again, i did find this https://web.archive.org/web/20041120084657/http://arrakis.nc... And in my mind the whole story was a publicity stunt, considering the political wind at the time and the place that broke the story; which was then quoted at me in college.

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AlphaAndOmega0 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I would be curious to know more precise numbers. My intuition suggests that when Sony sells millions of them, the number diverted for non-gaming purposes is maybe thousands or tens of thousands.

	▲	mr_toad 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Nearly 90 million units by the time it was discontinued, but I'm not sure how many were sold at the point they removed Linux support.

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monocasa 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The marketing win of being able to say "these are so poweful, the military literally uses them in supercomputers" certainly more than makes up for a hundredth of a percent of consoles having a zero attach rate.